From: Emlyn O'regan (oregan.emlyn@healthsolve.com.au)
Date: Mon Sep 09 2002 - 19:45:04 MDT
> On Mon, Sep 09, 2002 at 09:44:23PM +0200, Eugen Leitl wrote:
> >
> > I'm arguing that self-preservation (or lack thereof) are
> intrinsically
> > outside of the ratio-domain. Why is going on living better
> than dying,
> > rationally? You can't answer that, without taking resort to an axiom
> > anchored outside of the realm of rationality. Unless your
> definition of
> > rationality includes these axioms, which is quite arbitrary.
>
Anders wrote:
> I think Rand made a very clever point here (maybe her best,
> IMHO): there
> might not be any good reason to choose existence over
> non-existence, but
> once you make that choice for whatever reason a lot of consequences
> follows. That life is better than non-life might not be an axiom, but
> all living beings have ancestors that followed it and will
> follow it (if
> they don't, they will usually quickly become non-living). As
> I see it it
> is a kind of nearly trivial prerequisite a la the anthropic
> principle -
> we are for life because we are alive.
>
>
The very same argument goes for reproduction, however. Thus this reasoning
cannot untangle the Reproduce vs Self Preserve dilemma.
(As an aside, Transhumanism would demand that you question both
imperatives... the way things are bears no relation to the way they should
ideally be for any given individual, or group)
I think that Eugene's position is stronger than Robert's, not because either
strategy is correct, but because it is not actually clear how to decide
which is correct. I surmise that there would be civilisations which would
follow both paths.
Given this, you run up against the same dynamic that got us here in the
first place. Are we surrounded by immortals, or short lived phenotypes? Why?
Because reproduction, while not clearly helpful to the individual, leads to
the offspring of reproduction filling the space. If even a few percent of
civilisations decides to send out spores, the result should be a floodfill
of the galaxy. Those who do not reproduce become a very small minority.
If this is a dangerous prospect to the non-reproducers, what options do they
have?
- Hide in hole (this might be possible to do indefinitely, but it will not
affect non reproducers)
- Go out and stop the reproduction
And how do you go out to stop the wavefront of exponential replication? You
would have to be everywhere at once... you'd have to take over all the
matter. How do you do that?
Probably there is only one way to do it. You must replicate.
The basics seem to be that
- It is very cheap to send seeds
- Seeds could potentially be a threat
- Other people's seeds are most likely a very much larger threat
There are so many possible reasons to replicate. Ideology, Proactive
defense, distributed backups (of a sort). As long as it makes sense to even
one competent civilisation to do it, it should take over everything.
So where are they? Hmm...
Emlyn
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